Education and Skills Bill

I support the spirit of the amendments. It is immensely important not to introduce the element of education as something which is almost a punishment; something which you have got to do whether you want to or not. Education for young people, as opposed to children, should be something that they do voluntarily with joy, pride and pleasure. I have spent a great part of my life working with mature students, people who come into higher education at the age of anything from 23 or 24 to 50 or even more. Almost without exception, these people talk about the reasons why they ceased to engage in education at the end of compulsory schooling. They talk about being slow to grow up; about the allure and excitement of adventure; about wanting to go travelling; about falling in love and deciding that they would rather get married or live together, or whatever they decided to do. They talk about a host of reasons. They talk about wanting to earn some money, being independent and showing that they were grown up. This underlines the point, which has been made several times already in our discussions on the Bill, that young people grow up at different ages. Some people are ready to go on the tramlines—they stay on in school until the age of 18 or 19, go straight to university and go on to take a PhD—and many thousands successfully do that. But many other thousands do not want to do that and, for them, carrots work better than sticks. I have commended the Government many times on the carrots that they have offered so far. Offering some finance to young people to stay on in education is a brilliant idea which has worked very well. Introducing alternative curricula through the diplomas is also a brilliant idea—I hope that it will work well and keep more young people in. However, I beg the Government to think twice about the element of compulsion when, for so many young people, not just a tiny minority, it is simply the wrong time, the wrong age and the wrong kind of opportunity.